Daniel Estulin: Journalists who participate in The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer are some of the best-known political pundits in the United States, such as Paul Gigot, David Gergen, William Kristol and William Safire. All of them belong to the Bilderberg Group, the CFR or the Trilateral Commission. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eric Zuesse: The framing conditions shaping the corporate media: 1. Corporate nature, elite/ parent company ownership and profit-maximising orientation 2. Dependence on allied corporate advertisers for 50 per cent or more of revenues 3. Dependence on cheap, subsidised news supplied by state-corporate allies 4. Political, economic and legal carrots and sticks rewarding corporate media conformity and punishing dissent. When facts, ideas, journalists and managers are poured into this framework, the result is a highly filtered, power-friendly 'pyramid' of media performance. Every aspect of corporate media output is shaped by these framing conditions. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Paul Craig Roberts: Most newspapers are part of huge conglomerates, and the policy that comes down is that you don't rock any boats. You can't make the government upset because the value of the company is the broadcast licenses, and the government will not renew them, and we can't make our corporate owners mad because they will fire us, and we can't make the advertisers mad or they will pull their advertising. So the media can't say anything that will upset the power structure. And that's what had happened to the press. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Oliver Stone: As news organizations are increasingly driven by a bottom-line mentality, the news we get becomes more and more sensational. What is the difference between Time and Newsweek? Between ABC, NBC, and CBS News? Between the Washington Post and the New York Times? For all practical purposes, none. The concentration of media power means that Americans increasingly get their information from a few sources who decide what is "news. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Glenn Greenwald: If you only speak to a very narrow slice of people. If you spend most of your time in Washington only speaking to political elites in both parties, or corporate executives and lobbyists, you have a very distorted picture of what public opinion is. A lot of times both political parties will agree on a certain position that a huge number of Americans, often even majorities actually reject. And yet, if all you're doing is talking to people in political power and political and financial elite, you will believe that the range of opinion is much narrower than it actually is. Reporters and media stars and corporate and establishment journalists are so embedded into the establishment as a cultural and sociological matter, that they're out of touch from what public opinion actually is. Polls show that huge numbers of issues and positions that are held by large numbers of Americans are ones that are virtually never heard in our media discussions. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Peter Dale Scott: The CIA developed covert relationships with about 50 American journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations. According to one CIA operative, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." The agency arranged for the publication of books to be read in America, and for at least one of these works to be reviewed favorably in the New York Times. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The scientific conclusions of Malthus are "considerate" towards the ruling classes in general and towards the reactionary elements of the ruling classes in particular; in other words he falsifies science for these interests, But his conclusions are ruthless as far as they concern the subjugated classes. He is not only ruthless; he affects ruthlessness; he takes a cynical pleasure in it and exaggerates his conclusions in so far as they are directed against the poor wretches, even beyond the point which would be scientifically justified from his point of view. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stephen Lendman: The mainstream media is in crisis and a free and open society at risk at a time fiction substitutes for fact, news is carefully controlled, dissent marginalized, and on-air and print journalists support powerful interests as paid liars. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Arianna Huffington: A problem that has been facing American mainstream journalism for a long time has mainly to do with access. They want to get their calls returned by the big guys at Goldman Sachs. So they develop a relationship in which the journalists themselves become insiders. Too often, consequently, they do little else than rewrite the press releases they are handed. This has cost America a lot. Mainstream journalists of The New York Times and elsewhere were complicit insiders both in the lead-up to the Iraq war and in the lead-up to the financial meltdown. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bob Shanahan: American journalism is dead and has been for at least the last ten years. It used to maintain a semblance of objectivity and at least tried to report on the facts on the news of the day without politics distorting everything. But bias and editorializing have polluted our newsrooms for some time now and it is only getting worse. The mainstream media has become a fake news propaganda machine. We cannot trust our mainstream news sources anymore for an honest view of today's political, economic, cultural, or even international events. There is no more objectivity, no more dedication to the truth, and no more fair-minded analysis of the facts available without taking sides. American journalism is dead today because our news reporters and commentators have let their ideology get the best of them. The mainstream media is on its way out and there's nothing they can do about it because they can't even admit there's a problem. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Pilger: For most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television. Even the internet for all its subversiveness has still a very large component of the mainstream. And that means we're still getting its singular message about wars, about the economy, about all those things that touch our lives. All we are getting is what I would call a contrived silence, a censorship by omission. I think this is almost the principal issue of today because without information, we cannot possibly begin to influence government. We cannot possibly begin to end the wars. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Des Freedman: Many senior journalists reflect the dominant strain that runs through their newsrooms - one based on the assumed benefits of neoliberalism and foreign intervention and the undesirability of redistribution, nationalisation and people like Jeremy Corbyn who don't share the same social circles or ideological commitments. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Nichols: The limitations of professional journalism, the influence of owners, the linkages of media institutions to the power structure of society, and the internalized presuppositions, have led to what can only be characterized as a palpable double standard in coverage of the U.S. role in the world. ... The U.S. news media, including our most respected newspapers like the New York Times, turn a blind eye to U.S. violations of core international law, having no qualms about playing up the violations of adversaries. It would be nearly impossible for the coverage to be more unprincipled. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
David Barsamian: he Washington press corps has grown closer and closer to its sources. It's to the point where Brit Hume, the ABC correspondent at the White House, plays tennis with George Bush. Tom Friedman of the New York Times is very close with Jim Baker. You find these relationships are so close that reporters don't challenge the subjects of their stories, they just tell you what the government is saying. In other words, they've become stenographers for power and not journalists. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Pilger: As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called "professional journalism" was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment-objective, impartial, balanced... in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign-you'll find they're dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Glenn Greenwald: The mainstream media receive most of their benefits - their access, their scoops, their sense of belonging, their money, their esteem - from dutifully serving a role. For them, 'neutrality' means: 'serving the interests of American political and military leaders and amplifying their perspective'. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Martin A. Lee: Mainstream journalists in the United States often function more like a fourth branch of government than a feisty fourth estate. If anything, the patterns of media bias that characterize sycophantic reporting in "peacetime" are amplified during a war or a national security crisis. Since the tragic events of September 11, the separation between press and state has dwindled nearly to the vanishing point. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
David DeGraw: The main media bias is in favor of the thieves who stole our country and economy, and own the mainstream media companies. The omnipresent mainstream media is the greatest weapon of oppression humanity has ever known. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Felix Dzerzhinsky: Where lies the way out of the hell of present-day life, in which the wolfish law of exploitation, oppression and violence holds sway? The way out lies in the idea of a life which is based on harmony, a full life enjoyed by the whole of society, by all mankind; the way out is in the idea of socialism, the idea of solidarity of the working people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Robert Parry: What we have now is the Reagan-Bush press corp. It's the press corp that they helped create - that they created partly by purging those, or encouraging the purging of those who were not going along, but it was ultimately the editors and the news executives that did the purging. The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy - a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: To pay for the arms race the nation has to cut thousands of social programs, ... The nation cannot go wild on military expenditures and also afford to care for old people, poor people, disabled people, farmers, or students. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA." wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: Now more clearly than ever, the CIA, with its related institutions, is exposed as an agency of destabilization and repression. Throughout its history, it has organized secret wars that killed millions of people in the Third World who had no capability of doing physical harm to the United States. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: As the Praetorian Guard, fighting wars for multinational interests while also paying for such adventures, our relative economic stability, domestic social and material infrastructure, and the freedom and liberties of the American people may all be forfeited. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
